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Scientists search for the still unknown heritable components that account for much of human diversity in traits and disease susceptibility.
Scientists search for the still unknown heritable components that account for much of human diversity in traits and disease susceptibility.
Standing over Darwin's grave in Westminster Abbey, Andrew Feinberg had a realization.
Feinberg, a genetics researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, looked to the left and saw Newton's grave. Just above Newton is a plaque honoring physicist Paul Dirac, a pioneer of quantum theory. Inherent in quantum theory is the idea of uncertainty in the interaction of subatomic particles.
"So I look back at Darwin's grave and it hits me; there's nothing like that in biology," Feinberg says. Nothing that deals with uncertainty.
Yet there is uncertainty in biology. Genes that run in families explain only some of the wide variety of physical appearances among people and their susceptibility to diseases. Much uncertainty in what causes these differences remains.
But biologists don't just accept this seeming randomness as a fundamental part of reality. Instead, they are seeking an explanation for unknown sources of variation in heritable traits, the way physicists are searching for a mysterious substance dubbed dark matter that could explain puzzling aspects of the cosmos.
And biologists have proposed some solutions. Feinberg's, scribbled down at a pub in the shadow of the Tower of London, is that chemical modifications to DNA could be the genetic dark matter.
